1 KING of CHILDREN Betty Jean Liffton (Biography of Janusz Korczak)

KING OF CHILDREN Betty Jean Liffton (Biography of Janusz Korczak) Who was Janusz Korczak? “The lives of great men are like legends-difficult but beautiful.” Janusz Korczak once wrote, and it was true of his. Yet most Americans have never heard of Korczak, Polish-Jewish children’s writer and educator who is as well known in Europe as Anne Frank. Like her, he died in the Holocaust and left behind a diary; unlike her, he had a chance to escape that fate-a chance he chose not to take. His legend began on August 6, 1942; during the early stages of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto-though his dedication to destitute children was legendary long before the war. When the Germans ordered his famous orphanage evacuated, Korczak was forced to gather together the two hundred children in his care. He led them with quiet dignity on that final march through the ghetto streets to the train that would take them to “resettlement in the East ” -the Nazi euphemism for the death camp Treblinka. He was to die as Henryk Goldszmit, the name he was born with, but it was by his pseudonym that he would be remembered. It was Janusz Korczak who introduced progressive orphanages designed as just communities into Poland, founded the first national children’s newspaper, trained teachers in what we now call moral education, and worked in juvenile courts defending children’s rights. His books How to Love a Child and The Child’s Right to Respect gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology. Generations of young people had grown up on his books, especially the classic King Matt the First , which tells of the adventures and tribulations of a boy king who aspires to bring reforms to his subjects. It was as beloved in Poland as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were in the English-speaking world. During the mid- 1930s, he had his own radio program, in which, as the “Old Doctor ,” he dispensed homely wisdom and wry humor. Somehow, listening to his deceptively simple words made his listeners feel like better people. At the end, Korczak, who had directed a Catholic as well as a Jewish orphanage before the war, had refused all offers of help for his own safety from his Gentile colleagues and friends. “You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this,” he said. I first heard of Janusz Korczak in the summer of 1978 when friends who had left Poland during the war stopped by my home on Cape Cod with a theater director who had just arrived from Warsaw. As she was describing what it had been like for her troupe to perform in Janusz Korczak’s ghetto orphanage, I interrupted to ask who Korczak was. I couldn’t tell if she was more shocked at my ignorance or at my mispronunciation of his name, but she spent a few moments teaching me to say Kor-chock before answering my question. As we spoke about him that afternoon on Cape Cod, Korczak emerged as a utopian and yet pragmatic figure preoccupied with creating a better world through the education of children. I could also see him belonging to that unique group of writers, along with Lewis Carroll and James Barrie, who were most 1 at home in the company of the children for whom they created their stories. With a difference. Korczak’s children did not romp with their nannies on the manicured lawns of Kensington Gardens but languished in the dark slums of Warsaw. He set up orphanages and lived among children in real life, not just in the imagination, for he saw them as the salvation of the world. It wasn’t that Korczak glorified children, as did Rousseau, whom he considered naive. Korczak felt that within each child there burned a moral spark that could vanquish the darkness at the core of human nature. To prevent that spark from being extinguished, one had to love and nurture the young, make it possible for them to believe in truth and justice. When the Nazis materialized out of that darkness with their swastikas, polished boots, and leather whips, Korczak was prepared to shield his Jewish children, as he always had, from the injustices of the adult world. He went with them into the ghetto, although he had been offered refuge on the Aryan side of occupied Warsaw, and spent the last two-odd years of his life protecting them and other orphans from starvation and disease. The theater director described how she had watched with others from behind shuttered windows in the Warsaw Ghetto as Korczak, head held high, marched by with his little band on that last day. It seemed to her then that this man, who behaved as if he had a divine calling to save children, had failed, much as his fictional King Matt had failed in his attempt to make the world a better place. And yet, by remaining true to his principles and not abandoning the children when they needed him most, he had achieved his own kind of victory. Korczak wrote of life as a strange dream, and sometimes my own life seemed just that as I began learning about his. Until 1978 I had been neither personally nor professionally involved with the Holocaust, but in the fall of that year my thirteen-year-old daughter and I went to live in Munich with my husband, who was beginning his study of the psychology of Nazi doctors. It wasn’t long before our small apartment was filled with books on the Third Reich and I was foraging through this grim library. Plunging into Holocaust literature, especially in Germany, was like plunging into an abyss. I seemed to be living in two time frames at once, with the past often taking on more reality than the present. Waking up in the middle of the night, I would transform the smoke stacks of the neighboring brewery into crematoria; the local train would become a cattle car; and Bavarian men parading in colorful costumes would metamorphose into the SS goose-stepping through the streets in full regalia. As an assimilated American Jew who had never dwelt on my Jewish identity, I was now confronted with what it meant to be a Jew during the Third Reich in Europe and, for that matter, through all of history. Often, in the volumes describing the murderous behavior of Nazi doctors, I would find references to Janusz Korczak’s last march with the children. I wanted to know more about this man -a good doctor- who had chosen to die rather than compromise the principles by which he lived. What had given him the strength to uphold those principles in a world gone mad? But something else drew me to Janusz Korczak. I identified with him as a writer -as one who has written fantasies for children, and working as a journalist in the Far East, reported on war-wounded, orphaned, and displaced children in Hiroshima, Korea, and Vietnam. Many of my books are concerned with the right of all children to know their heritage and to grow up in a world unthreatened by war. Yet I might not have pursued my interest in Janusz Korczak any further had my husband and I not been injured in a car crash in Paris and gone to the Sinai to recuperate. On our return trip by way of Jerusalem, I heard that some of the orphans Korczak had raised and the teachers he had trained were 2 living in Israel. And in that city of strange dreams I made a sudden decision to remain for a few months with my daughter in order to interview them. I rented a small stone house overlooking the walls of the Old City and went about with an interpreter to interview Korczakians, as they call themselves. They ranged in age from the fifties to the eighties, all having lived or taught in his Jewish orphanage during different periods after its founding in 1912. Many were alive because as Zionists they had immigrated to Palestine in the nineteen-thirties; a few had survived ghettos and concentration camps or had spent the war years in remote towns in Siberia. Others had come to Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War in the wake of the “anti-Zionist purge ” that essentially swept Poland of its remaining Jews. “I don’t want to talk about the dead Korczak, but the living one ,” they would begin, disturbed at his being remembered for the way he died rather than for the way he had lived. It was not the martyr, whom they had known and revered, but the vital, fallible father and teacher. Listening to them, I could envision Korczak as a modest, disciplined man who dismissed with ironic quip problems that would have overwhelmed others. Traveling to the kibbutzim and the cities he had visited during the two brief trips he made to Palestine in the mid-thirties, I tried to understand his state of mind then. Although not a Zionist, Korczak had been forced, like so many acculturated Jewish writers in pre-war Europe, to keep one step ahead of the malevolent thrusts of history. When the rise of extreme nationalism in Poland caused him to despair about the future of his work, he turned to Palestine but was deeply ambivalent about whether or not to settle there. Believing that, to avoid being a deserter, “one has to remain at one’s post till the very last moment, “ he was still in Warsaw on September 1, 1939, when the Nazi invasion of Poland settled the issue for him.

Load more